Build Change

Poor Gunslinger. I don’t think he’s going to last long in Jeremy’s group. The second he has a misfire, the other dragons are going to get suspicious. Gotta give him points for trying though!

Fitting into a group dynamic can be hard work, but I happen to think it’s the mark of a good player. I’m not just talking about the social aspects of gaming either. You see, there’s another kind of fitting in that gamers have to contend with, and it’s one that experienced players tend to overlook. It’s the kind that has to do with optimization.

Here’s where I’m coming from. If you’re talented enough to optimize a build, you should also be self-aware enough to recognize when you’re outperforming the rest of the party. When you see raised eyebrows every time you announce your damage, and when your GM is pulling his hair out trying to balance encounters, it may be time to step back and tweak your build. Maybe you can choose a fun ability at level-up rather than a “correct” one. Maybe you ham up your character’s phobia in combat, or concentrate on buffing your allies rather than swinging for the fences yourself. I’m not saying to play an awful character, but I am saying to consider toning it down a little. If you notice that you’re way more optimized than the rest of table, then treat your power moves like a sometimes food rather than your basic attack. Try to align yourself with the rest of the party. Chances are it will be a more harmonious table if you do.

So what do you say? Have you ever tried a self-nerf? Have you ever seen a player with a wildly different power level than the rest of the table? How did your group handle it? Let’s hear all about your power level negotiations down in the comments!

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Discussion (64) ¬

I am definitely guilty of this, and i have both self nerfed by only using my most powerful moves at specific times, and have self nerfed by just giving a flat reduction to stats, like one time after a dm complained i saved agajnst everything, i just gave myself a -3 to saves. In 5e, theres alot less of a problem with this since things are more naturally balanced, but balance issues do still occasional show up, but now me and my dm typically just discuss together over text the best ways to nerf me instead of either of us doing it indivisually.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but yeah… I knew people who knew 3.5 well enough I basically can’t play it or Pathfinder (or any of that decade’s d20 games) because I know it’s just a question of how optimized people want to be/know how to be is all that separates the worst possible characters that can’t accomplish anything even with amazing rolls and characters that can solo gods.

I find 5e and non-d20 systems a lot more balanced in this regard. You typically have to go pretty well out of your way to be noticeably stronger or weaker than the rest of the party and non-combat stuff is more often set up in a way where it’s hard to be completely useless in non-combat situations due to poor choices. Admittedly you can still wind up in situations where a GM has a struggle balancing encounters for the party, but that tends to at least be a “whole party” or “that one weird mechanic” issue. Or perhaps the “whoops I’ve handed out too many magic items” issue. Which I myself may be guilty of.

Still, not saying it’s impossible in those systems. I’m sure it is. D&D spells and features in particular often involve a lot of being very weird for legacy reasons or just written in ways that specify weird things or fail to specify things they should and this kind of stuff can result in accidental power leaps or loopholes if applied correctly. (Simulacrums casting Wish for example.)
Though just as often some things will be inexplicably far less good than they should be. (I’m looking at you 5e’s Conjure Celestial. Really? A 7th level spell to conjure a single CR 4 creature with almost no variety of selections to speak of. Why?)

Though just as often some things will be inexplicably far less good than they should be. (I’m looking at you 5e’s Conjure Celestial. Really? A 7th level spell to conjure a single CR 4 creature with almost no variety of selections to speak of. Why?)

I think they took the “summoning is the best action” stuff from Treantmonk et al seriously. Adding action economy to the team is a big deal. Hence the presence of the “summon ferrets” spell:

Relevant bit:
“”Other spells of this sort let the spellcaster choose from among several broad options. For example, conjure minor elementals offers four options. Here are the first two:
•
One elemental of challenge rating 2 or lower
•
Two elementals of challenge rating 1 or lower
The design intent for options like these is that the spellcaster chooses one of them, and then the DM decides what creatures appear that fit the chosen option. For example, if you pick the second option, the DM chooses the two elementals that have a challenge rating of 1 or lower.
A spellcaster can certainly express a preference for what creatures shows up, but it’s up to the DM to determine if they do. The DM will often choose creatures that are appropriate for the campaign and that will be fun to introduce in a scene.””

Yeah, good point! My Mrs is looking to play a Circle of the Shepherd Druid in a game I’m running. When she gets summoning spells I think I’m going to draw up random tables for them and just roll for what shows up; don’t want to be trying to find stuff on the fly!

When I was starting out in D&D, I didn’t know a whole lot about roleplaying and creating a good backstory, but one thing I did know was that bigger number is better than smaller number. I’m also an avid reader, and had half the player’s handbook memorised by the time I had created my second character, a human cleric.

Once said cleric hit level seven, we got some nice magic weapons and spells. I redid my to-hit bonus, as well as my to-hit bonus with my new spells.
Then I noticed that I had surely made a mistake in my calculations. I re-did them, and got the same results. A triple check revealed no errors in my maths. I suddenly realised that my stats had been creeping up over the levels, and I had power attack and a +33 to hit at level seven.
I decided to tone it down a bit after that. Fortunately, as a cleric that was my martial peak, and the material characters caught up as my spell casting gradually became my forte.

I’m mostly just glad that my power gaming phase (not that I knew the term back then) passed before I was learned enough to do real damage to the campaign with a Pun-Pun, or my Total Immunity build. (This was story was set in 3.5, if the +33 to hit and immunity to everything didn’t give it away)

I’ve always thought that “limit yourself to core + 1 other book” could be a good fix. Suddenly you’ve got to find new builds from a more limited pool rather than choosing from literally everything. It’s the difference between type 2 and extended in Magic.

My most recent character, a drow cleric is self-nerfed, but not due to discovering that I was madly overpowered. Instead, I was creating the backstory for a richly detailed character, but the backstory quickly began writing itself, and before I knew it, I had written down that they had taken a blind fold and put themselves into self-imposed blindness.

As a powergamer, I tend to make characters that overspecialize in a very specific mechanic.

For example, I might have a character who has “all the HP”, such a character will have such a huge number of hit points, temp HP, fast healing, and regeneration that he is effectively immortal when it comes to just damage. He could be naked and swim in lava without breaking a sweat. But that is it, he would still be vulnerable to status effects (daze, charms, paralysis, etc) or death effects, and he wouldn’t possess higher than average AC, attack rolls, damage, etc.

Another character I build might be untouchable (against things that require an attack roll) i mean ridiculous AC, miss chance, concealment, incorporeal, insubstantial. Such a character would normally have lower than average hit points, attack rolls, and damage, and would generally still be affected by AoEs and status effects.

If I build a spellcaster, I generally base my build revolving around a single spell (or chain of spells), overspecializing the spell to the point of ridiculousness. For example, if I chose teleport, I might eventually optimize the spell to the point that I would teleport my enemies to the moon. I would go out of my way to only prepare or learn spells that synergized with my chosen specialization (for teleport, that would mean no buffing spells, attack spells that only deal damage, etc).

My GMs are generally okay with this, as after I play the character, I retire them, never to use a character with that same overspecialization again.

I think I should mention that I generally avoid playing builds that would be problematic to a particular campaign or adventure. For example, I wouldn’t play the unkillable “all the hp” character in a combat heavy adventure or dungeon crawl. Instead, I would hold off on playing that character for a low combat or high intrigue game, where combat is merely incidental or not important to the story plot. It is no fun playing an overspecialized diviner in a murder mystery campaign, only to break the plot by solving the case within the first 15 minutes of the game.

However, as the hypocritical as it might seem, I strongly believe that Tier 1 classes (Wizard, Cleric, etc), should optimize their character to the same tier as the rest of the party. If that means that your summoner-build only gets to do their shtick of casting summon monster 1/day instead of 2/day because you have to prepare buffing spells for the fighter or rogue, so be it. Everyone knows that if a tier 1 character wanted to solo the dungeon, they could. But this is a cooperative game, and the other players should be given the opportunity to not just play, but have their moment in the spotlight.

However, as the hypocritical as it might seem, I strongly believe that Tier 1 classes (Wizard, Cleric, etc), should optimize their character to the same tier as the rest of the party.

I think it goes the other way as well. If a low-tier character is in the party with some high-tier classes, I think that they can take the gloves off and try to make the build a bit stronger than average. In my opinion, it’s all about zeroing in on the “everyone is relevant” range throughout the party.

I’ve probably talked about him before, but once again I am going to sing the praises of Duddy, one of the players in the first RPG I ever played in. The system was Alternity and Duddy had built himself a robot named CASE. CASE was a robot designed for riot control, and as such, was pretty heavily combat optimized. He had better armour than most tanks, could throw cars around and was impossible to knock out. This may sound like I’m condemning his existence, but it could not be more opposite. Duddy was an amazing player, playing CASE as super helpful and the consummate team player, never taking the spotlight unless the rest of the team thrust him into it. He’d act as mobile cover, pin down large threats, and generally just be super helpful. He also had the Asimov Chip flaw, which meant for the first few levels he couldn’t directly attack any humans, but he bought it off without telling us right before a huge fight, so him suddenly throwing raider cars around was an amazing surprise.

What’s with all the anti-Dragonborn sentiment from your comic? They’ve been core to D&D for a decade now, and yet there are no Dragonborn characters. There’s a Kitsune character before there’s a dragonborn character!

Tabaxi are cool, they don’t get enough love. Street Samurai is great for genre-bending jokes so I don’t see the problem with them. I do however object to the abundance of dirty elves.

You’ve got Devotion Paladin and Oathbreaker Paladin, you could easily have a Dragonborn Paladin of any of the other oaths. The Captain Planet jokes write themselves with Ancients, the Judge Dredd jokes write themselves with Crown, and the Mary Sue jokes write themselves with Redemption.

My table has several of the rotating GMs pulling their hair out over this. You know there is a problem when the optimized character can essentially solo the rest of the party during a combat heavy campaign. Unfortunately, this has often led to much of the rest of the table feeling that they have to optimize their characters better in order to meaningfully contribute.

On a more amusing note, I actually love adding self-nerfs to my characters since I firmly believe that flaws help to make characters interesting. Some of the more funny ones have been dumping Wisdom down to a 6 for a character who completely lacked any form of common sense… which the GM only realized when the first stat-damage enemy in the campaign coincidently dealt WIS damage and one hit dropped my character down to a score of 2. After that, my character spent most of the session with a dazed expression while wandering aimlessly into dark halfways and causing some of the party members to worry about her.

The same character/campaign also allowed a 3rd party flaws ruleset, with the character taking arachnophobia. The GM actually forgot I had it until they used Giant Spiders in an encounter. After failing a Will save, my character ended up bolting back over the rickety bridge (somehow making all the Reflex saves) and desperately shooting a few arrows before cowering in the corner as one of the spiders got closer. Needless to say, after this encounter the Rogue bought a fake plastic spider to “save” my character from and help manipulate them with.

Finally, for casters in general I always like to try to make a theme behind the magic I select. I really dislike how D&D/Pathfinder have different schools of magic, but only one class (wizard) which cares about them and even then finds it easy to just cherry pick the “best” spells of each school and cast them just as well as a specialist. So I always try to make some type of connection between what sort of spells my character is good at and what type of spells they’ll never touch.

I am a powergamer at heart. I love looking at books and feats and find stuff that works together.

I am self aware enough that I tone it down when necessary, though.

I usually do this by picking a “theme” and sticking to it. For my first character, it was movement – she had absurd speed, and she was focused on being extremely mobile, even when attacking. Another one was debuffing.

In my most game, where we’re playing a homebrewed system, I work with the GM to balance stuff.

I love feeling powerful, but I also love when the others are involved. Which is easier if I don’t completely overshadow them.

Problem with your theory: you only can have a overpowered build if the game is unbalanced itself or if the other players suck. If the game is unbalanced the company or the DM must patch up. If the problem are the other players then the OP player must help them as far as he can with their characters. If by level 15 in a D&D game the rest of the player have the performance of a 5 level party except for one player, then the rest of the party is the problem. In my group at least we don’t have this problem we are not powergamers but still we put a lot of fire power in high regard that help us with the abominations of the underdark, the hordes of the undead and the local town guard after a good night of party and carousing 🙂

If by level 15 in a D&D game the rest of the player have the performance of a 5 level party except for one player, then the rest of the party is the problem.

You make a fair point. If the group is truly under-performing then a bit of a tutorial from a more experience player can help. But honestly, if the table is full of un-optimized characters and there’s one munchkin, it’s a lot easier for the munchkin to fix their munchkinly ways.

Why to fix them? Just kick his arse out of the group and declare his character died in some innoble way, a piano fall on his head or he got some decease from carousing…
Well the DM can also speak with him in a polite and civilized boring way 🙁

On other matters.What is Gunslinger using? Is that a baby purple dragon hide, a pijama or a Barney disguise? …Wait forget that last, better made it a Barney hide. In any case he will learn that not even the (un)cool kids want him. His soul will be crushed by despair and sorrow 🙂
Can i get a picture of that moment, please? 🙂

Instead of ‘nerfing your strengths’ I prefer ‘reduced capacity in non-niche areas’. The greater the niche domination, the more reduction outside the niche.

Take my Ogress Barbarian Wrestler… she dominates in Strength, Toughness, and ripping heads and limbs off with her bare hands. But outside of the core (over) competencies? Useless. Low Will†, low IQ, low Perception, very few skills, and those tend to be low…. she does have tremendous singing voice though (in GURPS Singing is based on Health and her Health is incredulous… and she has Penetrating Voice so she can be heard from /very/ far away‡…).

† I am waiting for this one to bite the party in the butt…
‡ Did I mention she isn’t particularly sneaksy?

Isn’t that min-maxing? I mean, we all min-max to some degree. That’s how you make an effective character. But especially in GURPS, getting crazy strong in combat and then taking a load of minor disads seems like power gaming business as usual. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it makes a big difference whether you’re in a combat-centric campaign, whether your disads actually come up, and whether or not you’re irritating your buddies by constantly dominating in a particular area.

So far her biggest disadvantage isn’t one that really gave any points… it’s her huge size (11′ 6″ and 1,300 pounds). There are places she can’t go and places she can’t go quickly… also being a monster limits her involvement in Town (so far that’s only meant a reduction in her share of the treasure as she pays the other PCs to bring her stuff outside of Town).

The group has had fun with it so far. They love her ability to just lock down hordes of weak foes (they can’t hurt her and she’s the scariest thing on the battlefield so gets mobbed almost every time) and ability to lock down super tough foes (she yet to encounter something stronger than her). And the two times she dropped the party flew into panic mode thinking they were going to all die… when in fact it was just she dropped to touch attacks (not wearing armor makes one particularly /weak/ to those) which the other PC warrior was pretty much immune to (high /actual/ armor).

Overall the party has found her amusing, sometimes irritating in that she /casually/ destructive (breaking the occasional looty-loot†), but they love doing recon-in-force. And it’s GURPS Dungeon Fantasy which rather embraces min-max/munkinism as a core value.

† But then so is the pyromaniac fire Wizard with her pet fire elementals…

Sounds like a blast. The entire premise of today’s comic is that, IF IT BOTHERS THE TEAM, you should self-nerf. Happy team means no problems. 🙂

Still, the reason I brought up min-maxing in the first place is that I don’t think “but I’m secretly really weak to squirrels and have an addiction to coffee” is the best possible solution to “my team is annoyed that I dominate combat.”

My favorite solution to my powergaming tendencies is to be a powergaming cleric. As a class that lends itself primarily to healing and buffing, my optimization can only serve to help other members of the team feel awesome, rather than steal the spotlight away from them.

Oh man! Now I wanna build a mechanical construct dragon with multiple guns in its mouth to give it a breath or cone attack! It even has the mechanic of 1d4 or 1d6 rounds between each attack as it reloads them… (I know this probably already exists, but I like mecha, steampunk, and dragons, so… 😀 yay!)
Anywho… I have been guilty of this more than once myself. I have also seen others fall into over-optimization land. The DM usually pulls the offender aside between sessions and discusses viable alternatives to DPS-Tank-Boner-ism and the like… then the next session they have this ret-conned or story-altered feature.
I think I mentioned my Warforged-turned-Ironborn in here before, but he’s my best example. I wanted to play a arcane robot man, but after a while of ignoring things that a Monk normally has to reach high or max level for, we decided to story rebuild him as a Ironborn. This happened via an as-of-yet unexplained orb of energy taking out almost half his torso and most of the sailor on deck beside him. Then he had to be saved by the other party magical crafter, who did their best but ultimately couldn’t make him good as new.

Ha yeah that thing is cool.
Thought about building one in a campaign once…
But I am thinking more along the lines of an actual monster template that uses physical damage instead of energy for breath attacks.

I think this happened to me in one of the first Mutants & Masterminds games that I’ve ever played. The GM was running Emerald City Knights, and the character I played in that game was a speedster.

In the first encounter, each PC (except mine) were facing against some supervillains, while my character helped put out a fire in a crashed school bus with kids in them. My character got it taken care of pretty quickly, so I decided to help the others out. And that is when everybody starts having problems with my character, including the GM. Among the few things they didn’t like about my character, the root of it all was that my speedster’s build was too OP.

The main problem was that one of my speedster’s powers allowed him to be invisible while he was moving. Mechanically speaking, the invisibility power gave enemies a -5 penalty to hitting me. And from what the group has told me, a -5 penalty to hitting somebody works the same as having a +5 bonus to avoid getting hit. With my character’s Dodge and Parry defenses at around 14-15, that would mean the GM would need to get a 29 or a 30 on his villains’ attack rolls to land a hit on my character! And with the Move-by Action advantage, that means that my character is ALWAYS on the move.

So ever since then, I’ve been making sure that my speedster builds aren’t too OP.

Digging up my old character sheet for the speedster I played in ECK, part of his array of alternate effects has power that allows him to become intangible and phase through solid objects. So nets mean nothing to him!

One thing I forgot to mention that is relevant to this comic’s topic is that when the GM brought up the issue about my character’s invisibility problem, he came up with a compromise: That my character has to slow down when taking a Standard Action, reducing the penalty to hitting him to -2 instead of -5 when he does. And in return, the GM will grant a free surprise attack bonus of +2 on the speedster’s attack rolls if the target is unaware of his arrival. Sadly the game died out before the compromise can come into play.

All the damn time, I’m a crazy min maxer, so I set up self restrictions then min max within those.

Wanted to make a gun using watchman, refused to take any levels in gunslinger, and instead used the 2nd worse gun archetype, Steel Storm Investigator (according to a guide, worst being the wizard one)

Made a natural attack Alchemist with the Split personality prestige class (Master Chymist), 2nd personality refused to let me take any ugly discoverys or infusions. So no tumor familiars making me immortal or touch injectioning me, no Monstrous Physique into 5 natural attacks, no mummy immunities and so on.

Made an intimidating Centaur Brawler, won’t let anyone ride me for endless flanking & action economy, won’t take that feat that lets me roll intimidate on every single punch, and run a overrun feat build instead of the better pounce options.

and so on, careful self sabotage that I then try to over come with my min max mastery.

I wasn’t always a power gamer. I actually learned it to keep up with the rest of my group, who are fairly skilled power gamers. That being said, I’ve had to tone it back lately as the most prominent and skilled combat monster in our group will occasionally remark “I thought only i knew about that trick.” or “I never expected you to combine A and B! That’s further than even I would go!”

Thankfully, most of these have been tricks that could be devastating, but I had played with the numbers enough that they were just impressive rather than OP. Which is good, because I mostly GM now, so my players often run into boss villains that are actually very optimized player builds.

Notable examples include: combining Area Effect and Aura on the Special Attack Attribute in BESM d20 (Which makes the AoE not give a Reflex save), but adding an effect that gave a Will Save instead, Warrior Summoner in Anima: Beyond Fantasy with a guy who summons the Emperor after starting his own cult (allowing for a big multi-attack spam in a game where being attacked multiple times in a round usually results in your death), and a Changeling: The Lost villain who really abused the contracts of mirror to be able to see through them, travel through them, and steal objects that were reflected in them.

Still, I am proud that I’ve not alienated the new players when my group mostly changed composition and has two new players and the old most prominent power gamer, so apparently I retain my good sense of balance.

The beauty of RPGs is the ability to accommodate different characters. If anything, that’s the aspect that is least developed because we have a certain expectation of “balance” and everyone being able to contribute to a similar level. But actually the stories we remember often don’t have equal contributions.

Bilbo and the dwarves. Pod and Brienne. The hobbits and the various groups they ride with. Everyone in A New Hope. The Terminator and co.

I think it can be a question of focus and what we pay attention to or ignore. The sailor in an island-hopping pirate game is the captain on the water but perhaps just the funny-talking guy with a taste for spinach the rest of the time.

In an unexplored wild forest, the hunter might just take the occasional shot in combat, but might guide those city-slicker adventurers through wilderness they would never make it out of.

The chef might dungeon-delve in search of new ingredients or to experience the cuisine of other cultures, and be the famous social guy in cities.

I think that as long as the character is fun to play and adventure with, and that the group and DM are onboard with less traditional play (it does for example mean encounters need to be toned down), it’s not an issue.

I’ve always wanted to try an asymmetrical game. Do the fellowship, like you mentioned. I figure that would lend itself to asymmetrical encounter design, with each side having different rules of engagement (e.g. “avoid capture” vs “defeat the enemies”.)

You mention expectations though, so there’s an important caveat: make sure you know that this is the type of game you’re going into! I certainly wouldn’t want to find out after the fact that I been consigned to the role of helpless hobbit.

I feel like Gunslinger’s first misfire would be a great innuendo were Jeremy’s group old enough for it to be appropriate (“I swear, this has never happened before!”).

I self-nerfed once because I realized that playing a Warblade in a 3.P game with mostly new players left me overshadowing them and just wanting to play a Warblade. But with the GM wanting most of the game to be Pathfinder, I jumped ship to the Fighter, but with a mostly similar build. It didn’t really work out though, and at least one other player felt I was patronizing them.

Ever since then, I’ve preferred not to self-nerf due to overshadowing others. I’d rather spend time out of game fostering the growth of the player than hindering their experience by playing a half-assed character. That’s not to say that it can’t be done properly, I just don’t care to find out how to do so properly.

I’ll be the first to admit that, depending on the player and the group, the self-nerf isn’t a panacea. As a recovering power gamer myself, I prefer the route of optimizing a support character. I still get the fun intellectual puzzle; I still get to be effective; the rest of the party reaps the reward.

Unfortunately, I rarely get a chance to play Pathfinder lately. I mostly play 5e, and I’m far too unfamiliar with the rules to minmax. This might just be a me thing rather than a system thing, though. But I do have a story to tell…

In a 5e group I play with, one of the players outshines the rest of the party immensely. He’s a power-gamer, but a really nice guy and doesn’t completely ignore roleplaying or politics in-game.

In our group, we have a ‘main’ campaign and side campaign and ‘side’ campaigns with different characters when our main DM takes a break… for months at a time. He’s been running this campaign for years (I only joined recently, so I’m the newbie) and this one player has both been in the group from the start and never missed a session. (Because of conflicting schedules, people show up whenever they can make it (some more than others) an XP is awarded on a session-by-session basis.)
Because of this, he is two levels ahead of the rest of the party. We froze his XP, and we’re catching up, but take this and add a dash of minmax and things go to Baator quickly. Encounters have gotten to be so hard that typically, at the end of a fight the rest of the party in on the ground failing death saves while he stands, barely scratched, atop a mound of corpses. And this is after the DM declared he can’t use his druid spells with his rage to triple damage output.

To be fair, he’s earned the power. Still though.

Even when we start a new side-campaign, his characters can usually out-DPS the party by a factor of two. I just tried my hand at DMing, and he built a (core) archer that can fire twice a round dealing in excess of twenty damage each time (if he’s lucky, and he is. He took sharpshooter and rarely misses.)

Once, he made a character deliberately to be weaker than the rest of the party, and he was about on-par with someone else’s attempt at minmaxing. It was crazy.

And I’ve never seen him with a stat roll below twelve.

He hasn’t, to my knowledge, ever had any of his characters drop below half health, with the possible exception of you-were-supposed-to-run fights. To be clear, we rarely have a cleric in the party.And for the while that I’ve been here, he’s never gone unconscious. Ever.

I’m about to try throwing a bundle of healing, low-level monks at him to fix this.

Encounters have gotten to be so hard that typically, at the end of a fight the rest of the party in on the ground failing death saves while he stands, barely scratched, atop a mound of corpses. And this is after the DM declared he can’t use his druid spells with his rage to triple damage output.

That’s exactly the situation that can come up. It’s the case where the power discrepancy bothers the GM as much (or more) than the other players. Their enjoyment matters too, you konw? Sitting down with the high-power player at that point is the only option. At that point, the real risk is that a GM-imposed nerf might lead to resentment.

I was running a campaign based in a lower-magic realm I had used before but was trying again. It was specifically designed because a number of us had the capacity to be power gamers, and found it could actually make for humorous but somewhat derailing campaign if we were all going super-max all the time. So the challenges were made to reward taking uncommon skills/equipment so instead of ‘self-nerfing’ it was ‘otherwise-rewarding’.

One player decided he was just going to make a only-good-at-one-thing specialist warmage totally focused on lightening use and ignore the advice of both the other players and me, the DM. I didn’t have it out for the guy (initially) and we tried to warn him that other perils would likely catch him in such a way that his single-focus would become a party liability rather than an asset. He was also already salty that I didn’t just let him bring his favored character from an entirely different realm into my campaign world.

Party enters an abandoned dwarven city that they discovered had something catastrophic happen to it and now the barrier between the plane of shadow and the material plane was broken with hidden portals between the two all over the place. The other players started thinking things through and drawing chalk outlines of where the portals were to avoid them. That guy just charged ahead…over a bridge. The party tried hard to warn him not to do that, because “it might be ruined in the plane of shadow” (Metagame they also knew that is exactly the kind of thing I would do.) Sure enough, he took and step and fell 20 feet into a fast flowing river. And with his chain mail armor, and inability to swim, and terrible strength, he promptly fell in, submerged and started to drown. The party had to save him and he got really upset that it was an unfair trap. He eventually left the group as the environment continued to present hazards beyond just simple “kill the monster, get the loot and the XP”

The party wound up loving that adventure though. They fought a group of shadow mastiffs and despite being 6th level and having a party of 5 found that 3 shadow mastiffs (CR 3) that can bounce in and out around them is actually really scary and a challenge to deal with.

Moral of the story, instead of “self-nerfing” as the outlook, “otherwise able” can make for a rich and interesting character. Especially if the DM finds a way to reward the seldom-used mechanics and encourage that type of play.

Moral of the story, instead of “self-nerfing” as the outlook, “otherwise able” can make for a rich and interesting character. Especially if the DM finds a way to reward the seldom-used mechanics and encourage that type of play.

Fair cop. I like that you used a well-rounded suite of challenges. So often, the min-max builds that focus on combat see play because combat is the only real mechanical challenge. If you fill you world with a wider array of threats, you suddenly see a wider array of player capabilities. Too bad that the new player wouldn’t listen when you tried to tell ’em though. I don’t get why you’d sit down at a table and ignore the GM’s “we play XYZ kind of game, bring XYZ kind of character” advice.

That reminds me of the early days of D&D 3.0. It was out early, and our party consisted of a DMPC Rogue, a Cleric and a Fighter (my guy). The original idea was that my Fighter would play bodyguard for the Cleric, since he had to provide all the spell support and also sub in for our missing arcane caster.

Of course, 3.0 clerics now being able to use heavy armour and having martial weapons proficiency meant he was capable of holding his own in a fight too.

But as we climbed the ladder, it became more and more clear that clerics don’t really need bodyguards (and my Fighter even took levels in the ‘Devoted Defender’ prestige class). In fact, with higher level spells, the cleric could easily match my Fighter’s martial prowess, in some cases even surpass him. But okay, that was him casting round-per-level spells that would boost him for a tough fight a day or two.

Then Divine Metamagic happened…

On the other side, Psionics happened too, and to counteract our Codzilla making my poor Fighter irrelevant, I switched to a Psychic Warrior. Now 3.0 psionics were a bit wonky, but that guy could hold his own against a ‘persistently’ souped-up Codzilla. At least until he ran out of power points. At which point he was basically a warrior while Codzilla was still Codzialla. But hey, who ever heard of a caster running out of spells in a workday…

The switch to 3.5 then actually made things worse for the Psychic Warrior. While in 3.0, stats had to match the desired spell level in each discipline individually, meaning that my guy would increase both INT and DEX to 15 to get 5th level powers while maintaining a STR 16, while being able to ignore WIS and CHA, the 3.5 casting stat was WIS all of a sudden. And many powers that my guy depended on were nerfed beyond recognition.

Guess what was not nerfed in 3.5…

No, I’m not bitter (any more), but it just goes to show, the only thing that can match magic in D&D 3.x is magic. If you are a muggle, you WILL be left irrelevant by the casters. It is just how the system works.

The Psychic Warrior and and later the Warblade I played as replacements were fun alternatives to the poor, maligned Fighter, even if they couldn’t quite match our Codzialla. And in Pathfinder, the work of Dreamscarred Press to bring Psionics and Martial Initiators to Pathfinder is, in my opinion, the best bet one has to help bridge the C-M-Divide.

Of course, if you are stuck with PbP playing, good luck finding a GM who allows psionics or POW content. 🙁

tl,dr: We tried psionics and the Book of Nine Swords to make our martial PC match the party’s Codzilla, results were mixed…

When you’re playing a top-tier class like Codzilla, I think it’s the best time to self-nerf. Only certain schools of magic, only support magic, paralyzing fear of melee combat… Whatever it is, find a way to tune the experience!

Here’s my reading: You guys tried to fix the problem by tuning the other characters, and good on ya for making the attempt. It was a new game, and you didn’t know the balance issues, so it’s no one’s fault. But when you stumble onto a crazy-powerful build, I think it helps to tune that build rather than tuning every other character at the table.